SOURCE: “The Indian in the Museum: Henry David Thoreau, Okah Tubbee, and Authentic Manhood,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2, Summer, 1998, pp. 25-63.

[In the following essay, Gilmore suggests that Native Americans were represented in nineteenth-century museums as masculine and unsubmissive—which corresponds to Henry David Thoreau's mythologized image of them.]

In the February 27, 1843, edition of the New York Herald, P. T. Barnum advertised his American Museum as a “Combination Of Unequalled And Unprecedented Attractions.” An “Ethiopian Extravaganza” and “The Indian Chiefs, Warriors, And Squaws” headline the list of attractions Barnum provides to back up his claim. These Indians, the ad assures, are “no miserable, degraded half breeds, but the Wild Warriors of the Far West,” and thus, “however high curiosity may be raised, the anticipation cannot come up to the reality.” Barnum promises his patrons not only the “reality” of undegraded, wild Indians, but also delineations of “Ethiopian” songs and behavior. Such a combination of attractions was, despite Barnum's boast, far from unique. In the 1840s and 1850s, popular museums often featured representations of Native Americans and African Americans together. Promotions such as the following were, in fact, fairly common: “the greatest wonder of the age, Choc-Chu-Tub Bee, an Indian Chief of the Choctaw tribe … in conjunction with those Sable Sons of Apollo, the original Ethiopian And Virginia Serenaders” (Philadelphia Public Ledger and Transcript). From the opening of Peale's Museum in Philadelphia in 1786, popular museums in the United States had featured both displays of materials “from … the Indian, African, or other savage people” (qtd. Sellers 46) and exhibits of living persons identified as either black or Indian. Whether it was through white men in black (or less often red) face, “actual” African Americans or Native Americans, or various collected artifacts and objects on display, early American museums constructed both blacks and Indians as “primitive” others, located somewhere in the natural order between the rest of “brute creation” on display and white audience members.¹

The museum produced racial distinctions not simply between undifferentiated blacks or Indians and white audience members, but also between Indians and blacks. Although museums represented Indians and blacks in complex, multivalent ways, they tended to make a core distinction between the two races. Museum minstrel shows, with their “authentic” plantation ditties and low comedy performed by white men in blackface, primarily depicted blacks as sentimentally child-like Sambos who were content to dance and sing on Southern plantations.² Museum displays revealed Indians—represented neither by “degraded half breeds” nor by whites in facepaint, but by “wild” Indians uncorrupted by white culture—as stoically vanishing in the advance of a white civilization to which they would not submit. The antebellum museum differentiated blacks and Indians from each other foremost by their relationship to (white) civilization—blacks were happy as subordinate members, capable of limited assimilation, while inimitable and immutable Indians refused such subordination.

The antebellum museum not only mapped race along a gender axis—blacks represented effeminate submission, Indians manly resistance—but also became a site for the inculcation of gender ideals among a new white constituency. These museums defined themselves against the almost exclusively male haunts of the theater and the minstrel hall. Although theaters and minstrel halls attracted white men across a class spectrum, middle-class reformers often disparaged them as institutions of iniquity. In response, popular museums portrayed themselves as places of rationalized and moral amusement where women and children of the rising bourgeoisie could safely be entertained and educated. As Richard Butsch has pointed out, through such things as matinee shows, special seating, and special admittance policies, mid-century museums opened up a consumption-oriented public sphere marked as particularly feminine.³ While mid-century middle-class manhood has been characterized as spiritually focused upon the ideal of self-restrained familial provider, this spiritual ideal was constantly in tension with the idea that men needed to recover a more physical, “authentic” manhood supposedly exemplified by the lives of “primitive” peoples.⁴ These tensions become highlighted in the popular museum's contradictory impulses towards a more “feminine” sentimentalism and a more “masculine” depiction of nature's life-and-death struggles. Gendered representations of black and Indian bodies both displayed and helped the museum to resolve these tensions. Examining representations of blacks and Indians in the museum can thus help to reconstruct links between notions of white manhood, mass culture, and racial ideologies in antebellum America.

In this essay, I will focus on the performances and biographies of Okah Tubbee, the advertised Choc-Chu-Tub Bee, and the writings of Henry David Thoreau as a way of describing how antebellum popular museums—despite being seen as a particularly respectable, and hence feminine, form of entertainment—enabled men to gain access to an “authentic” masculine self by simultaneously identifying themselves with the figure of the primitive Indian and distancing themselves from the figure of the enslaved black man. Thoreau and Tubbee are particularly fruitful figures for such an examination. Thoreau is well-known for both his celebration of the Indian and his anti-slavery sentiments, and throughout his writings, he makes numerous references to visits to museums, often disparaging them as dead institutions. Tubbee was born a slave in Mississippi, but claimed to have been the stolen child of a Choctaw chief. After escaping slavery, he supported himself and his family by playing a variety of instruments and speaking on behalf of Indian causes at museums in the late 1840s. Thoreau's ambivalence about the museum derived from the ways in which it erected and disturbed racial and gender lines through exhibits of idealized, masculine Indians; Tubbee exploited these paradoxical effects in order to secure his own Indian identity. In their different uses of and reactions to the Indian in the museum, Thoreau and Tubbee underline the ways in which the museum did not simply detach Native Americans and their objects from some original cultural context—thus fragmenting and embalming such cultures; instead, it simultaneously constructed such cultures as authentic, so that both whites and Native Americans could re-appropriate Indianness for different political and aesthetic ends.⁵ By similarly identifying manliness with a type of essential Indianness both constructed by the museum and framed as antithetical to the museum, Thoreau and Tubbee point to the ways in which the museum became a site where both spectator and performer, respectable bourgeois author and marginalized musician, could recover a sense of authentic manhood.⁶

“THE HAPPY FAMILY”

In the 1840s and 1850s, the most famous—and infamous—museum in the United States was P. T. Barnum's American Museum in New York City. Despite its proprietor's reputation for humbuggery such as the Feejee Mermaid, Barnum's museum was recognized by scientists such as Louis Agassiz for its contributions to the propagation of natural history.⁷ While other more exclusive and more scientific institutions such as Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Science and the new Smithsonian Institution did exist, most museums in the United States, like Barnum's, depended on drawing paying audiences by combining amusement with education. To draw customers, antebellum museums exhibited much more than cases full of stuffed animals and various artifacts: “educated dogs, industrious fleas, automatons … tableaux, gipsies, Albinoes, fat boys, giants, dwarfs … pantomime, instrumental music, singing and dancing in great variety, dioramas, panoramas, models of Niagara, Dublin, Paris, and Jerusalem … mechanical figures, fancy glass-blowing, knitting machines and other triumphs of the mechanical arts; dissolving views, American Indians, who enacted their warlike and religious ceremonies on the stage” (Barnum, Struggles 120-21).

Museum proprietors promoted the great variety of attractions in their museums, but also attempted to tame the chaotic effects of their variegated collections by producing written, often dramatic, guidebooks. By presenting the museum's attractions in more digestible, less threatening form, and by broadly defining museum audiences as respectable in terms of both dress and behavior, guidebooks helped museums to overcome continuing prejudices against public entertainment. Guides such as those to Barnum's museum from 1849 and 1864 and to Moses Kimball's Boston Museum from 1848 specifically emphasize the ways in which the museum mirrors the “traditionally” feminine sphere of the home. Both of the earlier guides feature an older male relative (an uncle in one, a grandfather in the other) leading a group of youngsters through the halls full of natural phenomena and manmade marvels. In the course of their tours, the elder relatives reveal exhibits as object lessons in temperance, Christianity, and patriotism as well as science. These guidebooks describe the museum as an urban analogue to, if not an outright substitute for, Christian institutions—“a kind of Noah's ark … bigger than the biggest church you ever saw” (Tom Pop's 5). There, things which would make you “jump out of your skin” in fright—including “the scalping knives, and medicine bags, and wampum belts, and tomahawks, and pipes of our Indians”—are made safe for children and grandfathers to play with (Tom Pop's 21).⁸ At the end of the fictional tour of Barnum's museum in Sights and Wonders in New York (1849), the anonymous author sums up this logic by stressing the museum's safe, familial qualities: “such regulations are established and enforced, as render it perfectly safe and pleasant for ladies and children to visit the Museum though unaccompanied by gentlemen” (23).

The later Illustrated Catalogue and Guide Book to Barnum's American Museum (1864) is even more explicit, if less dramatic, about the domesticating effects of the museum. Barnum's museum is “unquestionably, from its position, character and popularity, as well as from its attractions of the most amusing, instructive and moral character, the special place of family amusement in the united states.” By promising “to keep the Museum always free from every objectionable feature … to use the same precaution to protect any visitors while in the Museum that I would my own family,” Barnum guarantees “that any lady or child shall be as safe here as in their own house” (back cover unpaged). Exhibits like the “Happy Family”—“[a] miscellaneous collection of beasts and birds (upwards of sixty in number), living together harmoniously in one large cage, each of them being the mortal enemy of every other, but contentedly playing and frolicking together, without injury or discord” (102)—epitomize the museum as a whole. Through “healthy amusement blended with valuable instruction” (back cover), the museum's exhibits present “an amusing picture of the harmony which care and kindness may produce in brute creation” (4), a harmony then replicated in the families in attendance (see figure 1). As all three of the illustrated guides indicate (figures 2 and 3), a family could walk as safely through the graceful halls as through their own homes, and in doing so, they would become another “Happy Family” on display, an example of the highest achievement of God's ordered creation.⁹ Through written promotions such as guidebooks and advertisements, museums attempted to tame and normalize their promiscuous attractions and audiences, thus creating a family-oriented mode of amusement and education.

“DEAD NATURE COLLECTED BY DEAD MEN”

Thoreau focused his contempt for the museum on precisely that aspect which these guidebooks foreground—its role in domesticating the wild for mass, urban consumption. Seven months after the February 1843 New York Herald advertisement, Barnum was still featuring a troupe of “Ethiopian Serenaders” alongside his “Moving Dioramas” and ethnographic and natural history attractions (New York Herald, Sept. 23, 1843). His main attraction, however, was once again a group of Indians. Barnum boasted of their popularity to Kimball: “they will draw,” “they could fill your room that night to overflowing, as it fills the people with enthusiasm to see the Indians beat their opponents as they will at the Boat Race” (Barnum correspondence, Sept. 26 and Sept. 23, 1843). On October 1, 1843, while living on Staten Island, Thoreau wrote his mother about this boat race: “A canoe race ‘came off’ on the Hudson the other day, between Chippeways and New Yorkers.” As he continues, he compares the race to Barnum's other most recent scheme, the Great Buffalo Hunt of August 31—“[it] must have been as moving a sight as the buffalo hunt which I witnessed.” After praising, perhaps sarcastically, the moving effect of wild Indians and buffaloes on the cityscape, Thoreau, as in most of his letters from New York, turns to a condemnation of the masses: “But canoes and buffaloes are all lost, as is everything here, in the mob.” The effect of constantly “seeing so many people,” “mere herds of men,” is a lessened appreciation for the body—“one comes to have less respect for flesh and bones, and thinks they [the masses] must be more loosely jointed, of less firm fibre, than the few he had known” (Familiar 109-10). The kinds of attractions Barnum exhibited and promoted were not simply humbuggery; rather, they became worthless because of the urban context within which they were shown, a context within which the material body came to have less true substance, less power to evoke nature and its mysteries.

A week earlier, Thoreau had recorded his feelings about museums in his journal:

I hate museums. … They are dead nature collected by dead men. I know not whether I muse most at the bodies stuffed with cotton and sawdust or those stuffed with bowels and fleshy fibre outside the cases. Where is the proper herbarium, the true cabinet of shells, and museum of skeletons, but in the meadow where the flower bloomed, by the seaside where the tide cast up the fish, and on the hills and in the valleys where the beast laid down its life and the skeleton of the traveller reposes on the grass?¹⁰

Although Thoreau does not specifically mention visiting Barnum's museum while living on Staten Island, his familiarity with Barnum's attractions and his later visits—he mentions going to Barnum's museum on three other occasions in his journal—make it likely that Barnum's American Museum was probably a referent for his remarks.¹¹ Thoreau's commentary here encapsulates the attitudes that he consistently exhibits towards museums. He begins with disdain for the whole museal project—it is simply another institution of a dead culture that deadens everything it touches—and places the museum in direct opposition to the wild life of nature. Yet by the end of the passage, Thoreau is speaking of a “true” “museum,” thus embracing the idea of the museum by converting all of nature into a “proper” one. While the improper museum separates both observer and object from the reality of nature, rendering them moribund, the “true” “museum” would grant access to the truths and reality of nature lying behind and uniting and revivifying both live and dead bodies.¹² The true museum would help unveil the life in objects, both living and dead, rather than turning living things into dead objects.

Thoreau elaborates this distinction between the museum and nature further in a passage from the “Ktaadn” section of The Maine Woods. Upon ascending the mountain, Thoreau expresses his sense of awe at the sublimity of the scene:

I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature. … We have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. … It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we. … What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

(69-71, underlining added)

Thoreau seeks for “Matter, vast terrific,—not his Mother Earth” (70). In its contrast to that wild matter, the museum stands as a weak, unreal substitute for contact with a more masculine “pure Nature”—“the actual world”—and one's body. Even in sublime nature, however, that contact is ever present, yet ever just beyond one's reach. This split between the “untamed” “hard matter” of nature (and the body) and the “ghosts” of subjectivity actually creates both sublime wonder and the desire for “the solid earth.” In Walden, Thoreau more explicitly states that it is through this desire for the unreachable that the “tonic of wildness … refresh[es]” and renews us: “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable” (317-18). We can never fully come in contact with nature or our own bodies, but in striving to do so, we can become more deeply aware of the divided, limited status of “our life in nature.” In experiencing “untamable Nature,” we become more aware of both our boundedness to and our separation from nature.

The museum, like other forms of commercialized amusements such as the theater (with which it was intimately connected), can only pretend to recreate such moments of insight.¹³ Such “artificial amusements” as “[t]heatres and operas” only “intoxicate for a season” and are “nothing compared to these pursuits” (Journal 10: 145). Thoreau acknowledges the possibility of gaining life-affirming contact with nature even “in the midst of cities,” yet he denounces the village and its attractions for “only producing numbing and insensibility to pain” (Walden 167).¹⁴ Thoreau singles out commercialized entertainment because its visual and aural attractions, by being commodified, become inauthentic—“The too exquisitely cultured I avoid as I do the theatre. Their life lacks reality. … They are surrounded by things that can be bought” (Journal 4: 154). While the sublime splendor of nature awes and invigorates us with its “mysteries,” commodified entertainments lack life and reality. Wild nature, like Walden, remains “too pure to a have a market value” (Walden 199); the museum's “myriad of particular things,” by becoming visual commodities, become unreal.

The museum, for Thoreau, however, did not simply deaden and derealize; it also emasculated both object and observer. As the museum increasingly became a commercialized space designed for respectable women and families, it became, like other civilized institutions, a part of the urban landscape that makes “our lives … domestic in more senses than we think” (Walden 28). In fact, if a man “resigned himself to [the] tender mercies [of civilized institutions] he would soon be completely emasculated” (37). “In civilization … man degenerates at length” (A Week 56), but “to make a man. … Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure” (“Walking” 225). Thus, while the institutions of commercialized civilization emasculate man, in fact “mak[e] the life of a civilized people [into] an institution” (Walden 31-32), closer contact with wild nature—whether at Walden, in the Maine Woods, in the far west, or possibly even “in the midst of cities”—could help re-invigorate manhood by offsetting the deadening effects of the market and other “domestic” institutions.¹⁵

“INDEPENDENT MEN … NOT TAMED AND BROKEN BY SOCIETY”

According to Thoreau, there are other men, “nearer of kin to rocks and to wild animals than we,” who have already achieved greater intimacy with nature and its truths: “how much more conversant was the Indian with any wild animal or plant than we are. … The Indian stood nearer to wild nature than we” (Journal 10: 294). The Indian's life in nature is the antithesis of the museum. In Walden's “Economy,” Thoreau warns his reader that in constructing a dwelling he must be careful, “lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum” (28). Thoreau contrasts this museum-like dwelling with the “Penobscot Indians … living in tents” (28-29) and the simple wigwams of other Indians not yet “degraded by contact with the civilized man” (35). For Thoreau, it is this intimacy with nature that makes the Indian so fascinating and such a perfect model for renewing manhood: “The charm of the Indian to me is that he stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully” (Journal 1: 253). In the Indian, Thoreau found the spiritual union of body and soul, nature and spirit, which reflected the transcendental truth he felt his culture had lost.¹⁶

Thoreau's deep investment in the study of Native American cultures and in the figure of the noble Indian is well-documented. Besides the numerous references to Indians in his journals and published prose, he spent the last twelve to fourteen years of his life compiling his Indian notebooks, 2,800 pages of quotations from a wide variety of sources on Indians and Indian lifestyles.¹⁷ The notebooks have led scholars to posit that Thoreau was planning to publish a lengthy treatise on North American Indians which would have, according to Richard Fleck, “correct[ed] the myopic view of nineteenth-century Euro-American historians” (“Further Selections” 4).¹⁸ Some less celebratory critics have noted the clearly “savagist” thinking which dominates Thoreau's earlier work, but they have tended to claim that his experience with Joe Polis near the end of his life helped him to move beyond a simply romantic or primitivist understanding of Indians.¹⁹ Yet the majority of Thoreau's writings on Indians, and certainly at least some of the sections of The Maine Woods on Polis, reflect the very kind of romantic “savagism” we most often identify with writers such as James Fenimore Cooper. For Thoreau, race becomes “reality”:

Who can doubt this essential and innate difference between man and man, when he considers a whole race, like the Indian, inevitably and resignedly passing away in spite of our efforts to Christianize and educate them? … Everybody notices that the Indian retains his habits wonderfully,—is still the same man that the discoverers found. The fact is, the history of the white man is a history of improvement, that of the red man a history of fixed habits of stagnation.

(Journal 10: 251-52)²⁰

The Indian is essentially different from the white man; he is wild, primitive, untamable, “Another species of mortal man, but little less wild to me than the musquash [he] hunted” (Journal 1: 337). For Thoreau, the Indian did not simply provide an example of a more authentic, natural existence in which body and soul were more integrated; instead, as in the museum, the Indian also could provide proof of the essential, scientific truth of racial difference.²¹

The Indian, like nature itself, can only be approached, not fully embraced because of “that strange remoteness [apparently biological as well as cultural] in which [he] ever dwells to the white man” (Maine Woods 158). Yet throughout his life and his writings, Thoreau attempted to breach this remoteness by identifying with Indians, if not outright imagining himself as one. Whether the explicit example of the Indian he follows at points in both A Week and Walden or the Indian guides Joe Aitteon and Joe Polis of The Maine Woods, Thoreau tries to emulate Indians because they are those “original and independent men … wild,—not tamed and broken by society” (Journal 2: 448). Thoreau's identification with and celebration of the Indian marks not simply a desire for a simpler, more natural existence, but a desire for a more masculine self. “If, then, we would indeed restore manhood,” we should do so by “truly Indian … or natural means”—“let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves … and take up a little life into our pores” (Walden 78). Indians' “wildness” makes them more truly men by making them untamable by commercialized culture. Thus, in confronting the commercial failure of his first book (A Week), Thoreau identifies himself with the seemingly misdirected Indian who, like he, has woven “basket[s] of a delicate texture,” but who has not yet realized “that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them.” Like primitive Indians, rather than “studying how to make it worth men's while to buy [our] baskets,” we should study “how to avoid the necessity of selling them” at all (Walden 19). In following the Indian's model of manhood, Thoreau attempts to return to nature and thus avoid the entrapments of a feminized, commercial culture epitomized by the museum.

“MANLY IN THE EXTREME”

While Thoreau ambivalently counterposed the commercialized museum with the wild masculine alterity of the Indian, Okah Tubbee was able to escape from what he saw as an effeminized African-American identity by playing such an Indian on the stage of the museum. By casting himself as closer to nature, more impassioned, and primitive in the very space Thoreau denigrated, Tubbee links these “essential” Indian traits with the museum. In doing so, he points both to the ways in which the museum produced primitiveness and to the ways in which the construction of the Indian as model of primitive manliness depended upon a definition of blackness as effeminacy. Tubbee's self-production in the museum as a commodity embodying Indian manliness mirrors—both reverses and replicates—Thoreau's construction of Indianness as a type of primitive manliness lying outside both the market economy and the museum. In this way, Tubbee's ability to construct himself as an “authentic” Indian not only shows how the museum and its market logic enabled the articulation of a masculine Indian identity through the feminization of blackness, but also helps to reveal how Thoreau's celebration of the Indian as a model of anti-market manliness depended on the market economy and the museum.

Tubbee was only one of numerous Indians whom Barnum featured in his chain of museums along the eastern seaboard.²² Dressed in Indian garb, Tubbee and his wife and child captivated large audiences wherever they went. During his performances, Tubbee would play various instruments of his own invention, call for the reform of U.S. Indian policy, and recite his own extraordinary story. Although illiterate, Tubbee produced a number of promotional biographies with the help of his full-blooded Mohican wife, Laah Ceil Manatoi Elaah …. These accounts not only give Tubbee's version of his story, but give insight into his stage performances, as most sections read as transcriptions of set pieces which could be spoken or acted out.²³ According to his biographies, Tubbee was born in Mississippi in 1810 or 1811, and as a child was called William (or Warner) McCary. Raised in slavery by a black woman reputed to be his mother, Tubbee claimed to have “discovered” as a teenager that he was actually the stolen child of a Choctaw chief—Mosholeh Tubbee—and not the mulatto child of his owner. Tubbee recounts how he used his musical skills to gain favor with a number of prominent citizens in the Natchez area and how, exploiting this favor, he convinced them of his Indian ancestry and subsequently used this Indian identity to escape from slavery. After living in New Orleans, performing aboard Mississippi River steamboats, and finally settling in Missouri, Tubbee began appearing at northeastern entertainment venues such as Barnum's museums in order both to promote Indian causes and to support his family.

Tubbee may very well have been a charlatan. His indeterminate “actual” race, however, is not particularly important. Instead, what is important is the way in which his biographies and performances reveal the instability of notions of racial difference yet depend on strict racial lines. Tubbee's story underlines the ways race was always being played out as both natural fact and cultural fiction. In order to establish his Indian identity, Tubbee and his wife exploited the essentializing racial logic of not only the museum, but of literary texts such as Thoreau's various writings on race and William Gilmore Simms's short story “Oakatibbe, or the Choctaw Sampson.”²⁴ Yet in order to escape the logic of the vanishing American, he also maintained and displayed race as performed and mutable—a racial logic which similarly co-existed with racial essentialism in both the museum and the writings of Simms and Thoreau.²⁵

All of the various versions of Okah Tubbee's biography begin with a section entitled either “An Essay Upon the Indian Character” or simply “Indian Character.” This section, probably written by Lewis Leonidas Allen, the editor of the first edition of Tubbee's story and a minor travel writer, follows the basic lines of characterization set down by a plethora of writers of the period: The Indian is of “a noble race, with high and exalted notions of honor, he scorns anything which is low and mean” (12). But like other savagist texts, this celebration of the Indian's nobility is offset by the idea that in Laah Ceil Tubbee's words, “the Indian race is fading away, their palmy days being gone” (Littlefield 3). In the first half of the narrative itself, Tubbee relies upon the essential traits of Indian character—as put forward in this introduction and by writers such as Simms and Thoreau—in order to prove his own Indianness. In the second half, however, he attempts to show that the Indian is not necessarily “fading away,” but instead can become a productive member of advanced civilization. In this way, Tubbee implies that Indian character is not a matter of racial essence, but rather a matter of stage of civilization.

Tubbee uses anecdotes from his childhood in order to prove that he is an Indian. He relies upon the idea—so prominent in Thoreau's writing—that Indians are closer to nature, and thus have some innate intimacy with wild creatures. Early in his narrative he recalls that while traveling through the wilds of Mississippi as a young child, he became separated from his companion and stumbled upon a bear family: “I expected they would kill me, but after examining me they turned and walked away” (19). Tubbee ascribes his salvation to “Providence” (20), but coming right after his description of his “proud heart” as “so characteristic of the red man” (18), the implication is clear—the bears, if not everyone else, realize, upon “examining” him, that he too is one of the “simple children of the woods” (58), truly “the son of the broad forest Chief” (43). Tubbee must be an Indian because it is the Indian who, in Thoreau's words, is “more conversant … with any wild animal.” This recognition of his lineage does not end with the wild beasts of the forest, but extends to other “children of the woods,” other Indians, and his reactions to them. Tubbee recounts that the first time he ever saw Indians, he could not control himself. He felt “nailed to the spot” (30), and as they approached him, he became “wild with delight,” finally “address[ing] them in a language … unknown [to him] before” (31). As he grew older and traveled throughout the south, he realized that he “had always loved the red people” (82), and it became clear to him that he felt this love because he was one of them. In his travels through Louisiana, Florida, and Oklahoma, all Indians, eventually, if not immediately, confirmed his conviction about his heritage. They “seemed to regard [him] as a companion; they did not even ask for or look for other blood in [him]” (32). Tubbee argues that his acceptance by other Indians was one of the strongest proofs of his origins and had “great bearing in the minds of many, knowing that one Indian can tell another” (40).

In convincing his readers—and museum audiences—of “the redness of [his] skin” (39), Tubbee embraces an understanding of race as biologically determinant. Despite being raised by a black woman in slavery, his racial lineage—the “fact” that his biological parents were Indians—determines his character and makes him act as an Indian. Hence, as Tubbee argues, his “exalted and noble ideas” and “manners … manly in the extreme” (29) had to “have been original,” had to have come from nature because he “had received no education, either moral, mental, or physical” (30). For Tubbee, being an Indian means more than acting in certain ways; specifically it means not being black.²⁶ As a young boy, Tubbee climbed “a bluff, which no other boy dared to.” When his false black mother punished him, she told him “that this was the way Indians and all wild savages lived, and could not be tamed; that the white people could not make as much service of them, as they could of the blacks, for they would not work for them, but spent their lives in wandering about in the woods, both day and night, living with the wild beasts.” According to this story, Tubbee's black mother began his lessons in the fundamentals of racial difference—the blacks can be enslaved, the Indians cannot—ending her description with “what is bred in the bone will be in the marrow” (23). In proving himself a “manly,” “noble” Indian, Tubbee must demonstrate that, unlike blacks, he is untamable.

Throughout the rest of his stories of his childhood in Natchez, Tubbee attempts to make it clear that he must be of Indian rather than black blood because of his unwillingness to submit to authority and to take abuse. From the beginning of his enslavement, he had “to be whipped into obedience” and, because of his “proud heart,” he refused to be abused by other black and white boys with “ill name[s]”: “I could not and would not submit to such gross insults without defending myself, which is so characteristic of the red man” (18). The racial nature of this passionate refusal to be abused becomes most evident in an incident he recounts early in his narrative—when called a “nigger, all [his] Indian nature was aroused” (Allen 20). This “violent and unconquerable temper,” Tubbee explains, indicates his Indian “spirit” which will not be “tamed” (Littlefield 27). All these examples point to Tubbee's ability to become red by differentiating himself from blacks. In attempting to reclaim the “freedom in which [he] was born” (45), he must argue that “the white man's blood possesses no more freedom than [his], [although] they have made no distinction between [him] and the negro slave” (43). By reinstating that distinction Tubbee can achieve freedom. By acting a certain way—both in his everyday life in the south and on the museum stage in the north—he gives proof of the biological truth of his race.

“DANCING AT HIS LABOR” VS. “THE WAR DANCE”

Tubbee was able to construct an Indian identity in his biographies and performances because racial distinctions between Indians and blacks already circulated in the museum and in the writings of people like Thoreau. By playing upon the distinction already made between “Ethiopian Serenaders” and “Wild Warriors” Tubbee could transform himself from a slave (a commodified body) to the relative freedom of an Indian in the museum (a visual commodity). Barnum's descriptions of his attractions highlight this racial distinction. His museum almost always represented African Americans and their culture through performances by white men in blackface.²⁷ When Barnum did display “actual” black persons, his focus was not so much on their blackness as on the uncertainty of their humanity. Barnum began his career in entertainment in the 1830s by purchasing Joice Heth, a black woman who, he claimed, was 161 years old and had been owned by George Washington's father. While Barnum originally promoted Heth's mammy-like relationship with George Washington, he spurred further interest in her by planting stories claiming that she was inauthentic—that, in fact, “she was made of india rubber, whalebone, and hidden springs” (Werner 32).²⁸ Similarly, in 1860, Barnum began exhibiting William Henry Johnson, a short black man with strange facial features, as “What is it?” a subhuman link between men and apes. In Barnum's museum, “actual” African Americans were curiously not representative of “real” black people, rather “genuine” blacks could be seen in his minstrel shows. Yet whether “the connecting link between humanity and brute creation” (qtd. Bogdan 136) or minstrel caricatures, blacks in Barnum's museum were represented as inferior and child-like, though not particularly wild or threatening.²⁹ On the other hand, Indians in the museum had to be “authentic.” Even when performed by whites in facepaint—as occasionally happened—Indianness in the museum needed to convey a sense of actual danger. It had to be “sufficiently blood-curdling to satisfy the most exacting reader of a penny-dreadful” (qtd. Wallace 139-40). Whether white men in masquerade or “actual” blacks and Indians, the essential racial distinctions made were the same. Blackness was a childlike mask consisting of burnt cork and India rubber; Indianness was savagely real.

In presenting himself as an Indian and claiming “manners … manly in the extreme” (29), Tubbee exploited the museum's tendency to reinforce the kind of racial distinctions that he made between Indians and blacks. To be taken as both authentic and masculine in the museum, he had to be Indian rather than black. A similar distinction operates within Thoreau's writing. Despite his anti-slavery stance, Thoreau's identification with the Indian as a masculine model depended on his characterization of blacks as effeminate. Thoreau's anti-slavery views are as well-known as his celebrations of Indian lifeways. From his refusal to pay the taxes of a government that supported slavery to his various eulogies for John Brown, Thoreau's oeuvre is littered with condemnations of slavery. Few, however, have attempted to explore the connections between Thoreau's anti-slavery and pro-Indian sentiments.³⁰ Thoreau's most explicit statement linking blacks and Indians occurs in an early journal entry: “The African will survive, for he is docile, and is patiently learning his trade and dancing at his labor; but the Indian does not often dance, unless it be the war dance” (1: 446). Although such moments of explicit racializing are infrequent, throughout Thoreau's work an implicit distinction between “docile” blacks and “war”-like Indians lies behind his construction of the Indian as a model of anti-market manhood. Tubbee's biographies and performances reveal the way that the antebellum museum depended upon this bifurcating racial logic. In light of Tubbee's story, Thoreau's ambivalence about the museum emerges as a reaction both to the museum's production of race and gender as visual commodities and to the ways in which the museum simultaneously erected and challenged gender and racial distinctions. The museum's commodity logic at once hyperbolized racial and gender difference—providing Thoreau with the clear model of primitive Indian manhood he yearned for—and at the same time rendered such distinctions seemingly unreal, simply a matter of facepaint and India rubber.

For all of his anti-slavery sentiment, Thoreau's writings contain few explicit statements about African Americans.³¹ Thoreau mentions helping fugitive slaves, both in his journal and in Walden, but on the whole, his anti-slavery commentary focuses either on the impact of the institution upon Massachusetts or, later, on John Brown. Thoreau's explicit statements about, and against, slavery indicate that, despite his sympathy for enslaved African Americans, he conceived of them as less manly than himself. They were not simply “docile,” but emasculated. Thoreau repeatedly equates slavery with emasculation. The main thrust of “Slavery in Massachusetts” is an indictment of the “million slaves in Massachusetts” (91) who will enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and thus attempt to “put a restraint upon [my] manhood” (94). His comments in this essay echo his earlier condemnation of Massachusetts and the majority of its citizens in “Resistance to Civil Government”: “we should be men first, and subjects afterward” (65).³² By being “the slave's government” (67), Massachusetts is a “slut” (68), with “hardly one” (70) man within her borders. While the state and its adherents are “timid as a lone woman” (80), “the true place for a just man is … a prison” (76). Otherwise, through a wounded conscience, “a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death” (77). Thoreau clinches his point by arguing that “I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men” (81). Helping to support slavery is the same as being a slave, and hence being a slave is a matter of giving in to the effeminate government's or degraded masses' ignoble demands, something a true man would never allow himself to do.³³

By couching his protest against the institution of slavery in terms of its threat to manhood and by equating emasculation with slavery, Thoreau's rhetoric collapses the distinction between the metaphoric slave in Massachusetts and the actual slave in Mississippi. In either case, any man who allows himself to be a slave is less of a man. Thoreau specifically makes this point in a passage from Walden on the Egyptian pyramids: “As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile” (58, emphasis added). Only a degraded, less manly man would allow himself to be a slave, whether in Thoreau's Massachusetts, ancient Egypt, or antebellum Mississippi. Thoreau suggests a racial component of this condemnations of men who allow themselves to be enslaved—morally, physically, or otherwise—at the end of “Resistance to Civil Government,” when he remarks that his neighbors who help support the “slave's government” (67) “were a distinct race” (83) from himself. While blacks will survive, even in slavery, because they are “docile,” real men like John Brown and Indians, “in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live” (“A Plea” 134).³⁴

We can see this distinction between Indians and blacks on another level by reconstructing Thoreau's feelings about minstrel shows. For Thoreau, both the museum and slavery connoted emasculation, and thus, the minstrel in the museum becomes a figure of particular contempt. In A Week, Thoreau celebrates the young men “rushing tumultuously from spectacle to spectacle. … Running hither and thither with appetite for the coarse pastimes of the day, now with boisterous speed at the heels of the inspired Negro from whose larynx the melodies of all Congo and Guinea Coast have broke loose into our streets.” But this celebration of rural “love for Nature” cannot stand the touch of commerce inherent in the museum (337). The “natural” music from birds or “dark Africa” remains authentic and “inspired” among boys and in the woods, but when performed in the space of the museum, whether by Jenny Lind or the Ethiopian Serenaders, such music becomes degraded: “The chickadees sing as if at home. They are not travelling singers hired by any Barnum. Theirs is an honest, homely, heartfelt melody. Shall not the voice of man express as much content as the note of a bird?” (Journal 12: 386, emphasis added). It is not simply the space of the museum that degrades such music; it is the fact that it is bought and sold. “The cities import [wildness] at any price” (“Walking” 224), but, because “trade curses everything it handles” (Walden 70), such wildness is thus rendered both impotent and unreal. Just as the wild cranberries are “jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature” (238) in Boston and New York, so primitive music is musealized to satisfy a similar taste. But as “the ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart” (173), so the wildness in the museum is domesticated, losing its immortal essence. The slave stands in contrast to the Indian not simply because he follows the orders of other men, but because he is a commodity and has had the “essential part” of his manhood “rubbed off in the market.” The black in the museum becomes inauthentic, a caricature in blackface or a mound of India rubber and springs. The Indian, on the other hand, by standing outside the market, maintains his primitive essence.

The Indian who is inscribed within the market economy, however, loses this essence and is transformed in terms of both race and gender. Thoreau catalogues such effects in The Maine Woods, the book in which he most fully confronts living Native Americans. Thoreau describes the first male Indian he sees as “a short, shabby, washerwoman-looking Indian—… [with] the woebegone look of the girl that cried for spilt milk” (6). The degraded Indian does not simply become a laboring woman; he also puts on blackface. On his next trip, Thoreau's moment of greatest disappointment with his Indian guide, Joe Aitteon (“apparently of unmixed blood” [90]), comes when he hears him “whistling ‘O Susanna,’ and several other such airs.” “O Susanna” is, of course, one of the most lasting of several tunes by Stephen Foster originally performed by blackface minstrel groups like Christy's Minstrels. The transformation of Joe Aitteon into a blackface performer illustrates the great extent to which he has fallen away from truly masculine Indian ways, the fact that unlike his ancestors he cannot subsist “wholly on what the woods yielded” (107). Singing or whistling “O Susanna” is like being a “shabby washerwoman”; it links one to the degraded and effeminate unskilled labor of servants and slaves. And labor of this sort precludes one from being a man: “the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men” (Walden 6).³⁵ Thus, the freedom of the primitive Indian's integrated life with nature stands in opposition to laboring for another. While the Indian's free life in nature “was as far off from us as the heaven is” (Journal 10: 294-95), the “negro” realizes that “slaves” will even “be obliged to work in heaven” (Journal 9: 215).³⁶ The primitive Indian stands outside the market—neither consumer nor laborer—authentically masculine in his wildness; but the “civilized” Indian becomes an effeminate, blackfaced slave to the market.

“THE REAL THING”

We might expect Thoreau to view the Indian in the museum as similarly corrupted. Yet, despite his attacks on museums for being dead, effeminate institutions, Thoreau celebrated the contact with the Indian's primitive wildness that museums provided. This paradox derives not from some idiosyncrasy or inconsistency in Thoreau's thinking, but rather from the often conflicting racial and gender effects produced by the commodifying logic of the museum. While the museum came to play a key role in the “feminization” of urban culture, it also continued to produce displays that attempted to conjure up the kind of primitive sublimity that Thoreau and others often identified with both the Indian and manliness. In re-fashioning his identity, Okah Tubbee exploited this tendency of the museum to construct the Indian as commodified, wild spectacle. Barnum specifically focuses on this production of a “real” sense of wildness in his accounts of his Indian performers. In his autobiography, he describes the performance of the Indians advertised at the beginning of this essay in the following way:

They gave their dance on the stage in the Lecture Room with great vigor and enthusiasm, much to the satisfaction of the audiences. But these wild Indians seemed to consider their dances as realities. Hence when they gave a real War Dance, it was dangerous for any parties, except their manager and interpreter, to be on the stage, for the moment they had finished their war dance, they began to leap and peer about behind the scenes in search of victims for their tomahawks and scalping knives! Indeed, lest in these frenzied moments they might make a dash at the orchestra or audience, we had a high rope barrier placed between them and the savages on the front of the stage.

(Struggles 151-52)

Lydia Maria Child described the same exhibition similarly: “I was never before so much struck with the animalism of Indian character, as I was in the frightful war-dance of these chiefs. … Altogether they looked and acted more like demons from the pit, than anything I ever imagined. … [Their voices] clove the brain like a tomahawk” (189). As Barnum explained in reference to another group of Indians he exhibited in 1864, “My patrons were of course pleased to see these old chiefs, as they knew they were the ‘real thing’” (Struggles 574), “blood-thirsty … treacherous” (576). Barnum needed his Indians to be wild enough to meet up with and exceed all the “curiosity” and “anticipation” that his eastern urban audience had formed about Indians. By terrifying their audiences, Barnum's Indians could prove themselves masculinely “real.”

The conjunction of Ethiopian Serenaders with Wild Warriors of the Far West served to underline a gendered distinction between the black and red races. Yet at the same time, this union could have the opposite effect, putting a check on both the sense of reality and the savage wildness conjured up by “real” Indian performances. The setting of the museum, and specifically the lecture room, imparted not only a domestic air, but an aura of performance, of un-reality. The lecture room was not only used for lectures, ethnographic displays, and minstrel shows, but, beginning in the late 1840s, “moral” dramas—theatrical performances with sentimental themes such as the blockbuster The Drunkard. In part, the difference of the Indians from these other types of performances—the sheer difference, for example, between weeping families or smiling “darkies” and tomahawk-wielding, screaming Indians—helped to underline their primitive wildness. Yet at the same time, the location of these displays raised questions of the theatrical, such as the distinction between the authentic and the performed.³⁷ The separating rope barrier then foregrounded the performative—theatrical—nature of the Indian's war dance and at the same time was essential to the dance's illusion of authenticity and reality.

Child's oscillation between sympathy and fear highlights these paradoxical effects and complicates Barnum's description of the terror produced by his Indian exhibitions. Her first reaction is one of horror: “In truth, that war-dance was terrific both to eye and ear. I looked at the door, to see if escape were easy, in case they really worked themselves up to the scalping point.” Yet Child goes on to say that “instantly I felt that I was wronging them in my thought. Through paint and feathers, I saw gleams of right honest and friendly expression and I said, we are children of the same Father, seeking the same home” (189-90). Child's overall feelings, however, are ones of sadness. She recognizes the Indian as “as noble a specimen of manhood as I ever looked upon” (184) and thus remarks that “it always fills me with sadness to see Indians surrounded by the false environment of civilized life; but I never felt so deep a sadness, as I did in looking upon these western warriors; for they were evidently the noblest of their dwindling race, unused to restraint, accustomed to sleep beneath the stars” (187).

Child's sadness resonates with Thoreau's attacks on the fatal effect of the museum. She at first feels fear, but by stripping the Indians of cultural markers (“paint and feathers”), she realizes that they are merely in search of the same heavenly “home.” But domesticating the Indian—making them part of the museum's “Happy Family,” by placing them in the same “home” with other “fellow children”—brings “sadness” because “the false environment of civilized life” restrains the “western warriors'” nobility, freedom, and manhood, their “authentic” Indianness. The roping off of the Indian dancers at Barnum's museum makes them that much more real, makes it seem as if they really are going to attack, thus creating them as exotically different savages. At the same time, however, the rope barrier makes them seem unreal by placing them in a “false environment” wherein they are rendered members of a dead (or “dwindling”) race. As Susan Stewart argues, “The body of the cultural other is by [these] means … both naturalized and domesticated” (109-10). The museum allows Child at once to feel fear for her own bodily safety, then sympathy for the Indians, and finally regret that the Indians are not as wild—and hence as real—as they originally were. As Child is moved to sadness rather than fear by “Indians surrounded by the false environment of civilized life,” so does Thoreau come to despise the Indian degraded by civilization. But, because of the paradoxical effects that Child recounts, Thoreau was able to see the museum and museal practices as a way of gaining access to the very authentic wildness that he saw that civilization destroying.

“A WILD AND REFRESHING SOUND”

The museum, in fact, played an integral part in Thoreau's attempts to recapture an Indian primitiveness. One of the chief ways Thoreau expressed his interest in Indians was through collecting arrowheads and other relics—“As much as sportsmen go in pursuit of ducks, and gunners of musquash, and scholars of rare books, and travellers of adventures, and poets of ideas, and all men of money, I go in search of arrowheads when the proper season comes round again.” Thoreau argues that “I come nearer to the maker of [each arrowhead] than if I found his bones” and that from “these signs [these ‘fossil thoughts’] I know that the subtle spirits that made them are not far off” (Journal 12: 88-91). Through arrowheads, Thoreau comes in contact with an “authentic” Indian spirit, moving closer to the Indian and the natural life the Indian exemplified. Thoreau not only collected arrowheads on his own, a collection that would at his death go to the Boston Society of Natural History's museum, but often went to museums to see such artifacts. Thoreau's journal is full of references to visits to various museums throughout the northeast, including a visit to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, where he saw Samuel Morton's collection of Native American crania.³⁸ As he put it on a day he visited Davis's museum in Concord, “I love to see anything that implies a simpler mode of life and greater nearness to the earth” (14: 87-88). Despite and, paradoxically, because of their domesticating and commodifying effects, museums granted Thoreau access to Indian primitiveness through the artifacts they displayed.

Thoreau found a reservoir of primitiveness not only in arrowheads or the “Wild Warriors of the Far West” featured in popular museums, but also in the educated (or “civilized”) Native Americans like Okah Tubbee and George Copway who often lectured in museum settings.³⁹ Thoreau's reaction to a lecture given by a Chippewa speaker in 1858 reveals his sense of “contact” with primitive wildness. From Thoreau's description, the lecture on Indian folkways and traditions was similar to the type of lecture and performance both Tubbee and Copway gave to large museum audiences in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The lecture had such an impact on Thoreau, that in addition to his lengthy journal entry about it (10: 291-95), he included his reactions to it in The Maine Woods.⁴⁰ In his journal, Thoreau records that he “went to hear a Chippeway Indian, a Doctor Mung-somebody,” and that he felt that “there was so much of unsubdued Indian accent resounding through his speech, so much of the ‘bow-arrow tang!’” (291) While Thoreau is at once commenting on the speaker's troubles with the English language, he is also celebrating the access to wildness that the “natural” language of the “unsubdued” Indian provides. This encounter led Thoreau to marvel at “how much more conversant was the Indian with any wild animal or plant than we are” (294-95). The version in The Maine Woods makes this sense of the wild even more explicit: “I have once heard a Chippewa lecture. … It was a wild and refreshing sound, like that of the wind among the pines, or the booming of the surf on the shore” (169).

The lecturing—or performing—Indian in the museum can bring a reinvigorating dose of wildness to the city. And since “life consists with wildness … not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him” (“Walking” 226) and “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (224), the museum and its commodified attractions, rather than being death-wielding tools of effeminate civilization, become the re-masculinizing saviors of that very civilization. The Indian, standing in for that wildness that is “too pure to have a market value” (Walden 199), remains outside the effeminizing sphere of the museum and its capitalistic logic, even in the midst of the museum. The museum, paradoxically, in its commodification and exhibition of the Indian, in the rupture it creates between the masculine Indian body and the observer with both physical (rope) and imaginary barriers, replicates the sublime sense of distance and contact that Thoreau locates between himself and nature (and his own body) at Ktaadn.⁴¹ Thoreau collapses the distinction between an effeminizing civilization and a masculine nature by finding that nature “in the midst of cities.” Just as “there is all of civilized life in the woods” (Journal 1: 252), so Thoreau can find that wildness which “cities import … at any price” (“Walking” 224), but which is “too pure to have a market value,” in the commercialized entertainments of civilization. Through the museum, Thoreau can mine the wildness of nature, the Indian, and his own body—a wildness always at one remove—in constructing an “authentic” anti-market manhood dependent upon the market itself.

“THE SAVAGE HEART”

Okah Tubbee used the museum's tendency to objectify the Indian as innately wild in order to re-produce himself anew; at the same time he made a case for the possibility that Indians could become civilized. Okah Tubbee's problem in both his performances and his biographies was to claim an Indian heritage by playing up the wildness that the museum produced, but then to claim that this wildness was, in fact, not essential, that Indians, such as himself, could overcome their primitive roots and eventually become assimilated into Euro-American culture. Hence, Tubbee had to use the idea of race as essential in order to claim to be an Indian, yet denied such an essentializing logic in order to argue that the Indians were not necessarily doomed to extinction. Tubbee tried to demonstrate that Indians were capable of and actually were already becoming civilized, that Indians need not “suffer themselves to be exterminated” (57). He argued that the “entire extinction of the race” (78) could be avoided by their “assum[ing] the habits of the pale face” (77). By donning paleface, as Tubbee advocated in redface performances alongside blackface minstrelsy, Indians could survive. Only by being able to slip from one mask to another is survival possible.

Tubbee's ability to use both music and written texts enabled him to succeed as much as he does in juggling these different masks. In addressing both Indians—in the hope of convincing them that some form of reservation system was their only “alternative to extinction”—and whites—in the hope of gaining support for the reformation of U.S. Indian policy—Tubbee depended upon his music.⁴² Towards these ends, Tubbee created new instruments, including one out of a tomahawk: “I thought if the tomahawk, the Indian's most deadly weapon, could be made into an instrument of music, it would be coming nearer to the Indian's heart”; “the harmony might melt the savage heart” (86). Tubbee “softened down [‘their hearts’] with melody” (92), so “that they might be refreshed and saved” (87). While the voice of the Indian in the museum was “refreshing” to Thoreau because of its wildness, Tubbee hoped that his music would “refresh” his Indian brethren by making them less wild. The refreshing sound of music then parallels the museum's dual movement towards wildness and civilization. Through music, Tubbee tried to domesticate, tame, and preserve the Indian outside the museum by making him at the same time pale and red.

Just as the museum at once produced Indians as wild and domesticated, so too did Tubbee's identification of himself and his Indian auditors with music render them both civilized and uncivilizable. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was a commonplace that music was the “humblest manifestation of” a “people's capacity for art and vitality” (Simms, “Literature” 102). This racializing logic organized the arts in a rigid hierarchy which situated music as the special gift of “primitive” peoples. Tubbee's musical talents certainly could have been a threat to his Indian identity, possibly serving to re-identify him with the (“primitive”) singing and dancing “darkies” of plantation fiction and the minstrel stage. Instead, though, Tubbee used his tomahawk-instrument as a way to reinforce his Indian identity by separating the primitiveness of his music from blackface performers while simultaneously performing sentimental tunes to stress his assimilation of white middle-class culture. Tubbee's music functions then to mark both his and his Indian auditors' ability to become civilized, the possibility that their “savage heart[s]” can be tamed, and at the same time functions to re-identify them with the eternally primitive and natural.

In order to articulate a position in favor of assimilation over extermination, while maintaining his allegiance to essential Indian characteristics—so as not to become black—Tubbee combined his museum performances and his music with a written form. Just as museum proprietors turned to written guidebooks to domesticate both audiences and attractions, to make “tomahawks” less threatening, so did Okah Tubbee use his written biographies to render himself and his tomahawk-flute more civilized at the same time as marking himself as not effeminately black, but rather masculinely wild. The collaborative nature of his biography makes this negotiation of identity possible. Tubbee needed to prove more than simply the Indian's “primitive” talents in the “humblest” of arts; he needed, despite his own illiteracy, to create a written text. Producing a written biography not only helped Tubbee promote himself as an orator, performer, and doctor, it also helped him prove his point about the capacity of Indian peoples to become “civilized.” But by having his wife write the text, Tubbee could maintain a pose of being outside civilization. By being both a musical performer and the subject of a biography written by another Indian, Tubbee could take advantage of both the conception of Indians as innately primitive and the idea that Indians' primitiveness was simply one stage on a path to their eventual civilization. By articulating his story both in the museum and on paper, Tubbee could begin to consolidate his identity as both Indian chief and American man, both as innately, primitively wild savage and as civilized breadwinner for his family. Through the museum and his biography, he was at once domesticated and naturalized, to paraphrase Susan Stewart, becoming an object of sympathy and fear, thus allowing him to negotiate his manhood through an essential, wild “Indianness.”

By turning himself into a popular entertainment commodity, Tubbee could claim to be wild, the very thing Thoreau claimed was unmarketable. Correspondingly, Thoreau could use the commercialized museum as a way to gain access to that unmarketable wildness. Thoreau identifies with the Indian in the museum, like Okah Tubbee, but unlike the basket-weaving Indian in Walden, this Indian is very aware that it is “necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy” his “basket of a delicate texture,” his wild “authenticity.” By both “importing” the wildness of the Indian into a domestic setting and sustaining an aura of primitive authenticity, the museum reveals that Thoreau was correct, that “true” wildness—in the form of racial difference—remains “too pure to have a market value,” not despite, but because “the cities import it at any price.”

Notes

1. For more general histories of early museums in the United States, see Bell, et al, and Orosz.

2. Although the minstrel show has most often been characterized as an extremely racist caricature of blacks and black lifeways thus legitimizing slavery and racial prejudice, scholars like Lott and Toll have demonstrated that, despite its racist content, the minstrel show was a complicated production in which various, at times contradictory, racial and political logics came into play. These characterizations even went so far as occasionally displaying “manly” black resistance to slavery in a positive light. But as Lott has argued, “the encroachment in the late 1840s of a larger female spectatorship on the minstrel show's generalized masculinism”—largely occurring through museum-theater spaces like Barnum's—“coincided” with the “generic projection of death and sorrow onto female or ‘feminized’ male black victims” (187). As Toll puts it, “Before the mid-1850s, minstrel portrayals of blacks contained much more than the ludicrous images of incompetent Northern Negroes and of happy slaves” (66). But this “fundamental ambivalence about slavery” disappeared as “minstrels portrayed Negroes more as emotional children to be protected and guarded for their own good than as serious threats to whites” (78). In other words, as the minstrel show became a more acceptable and respectable entertainment form, largely through its incorporation into popular museums, minstrel images became more and more centered on representations of black men as sentimentalized and effeminate, a representational logic Fredrickson has described as “romantic racialism.”

3. Butsch argues that these museums “were the first of several commercial establishments, including department stores and ice cream parlors, created for [“respectable”] women within the dangerous cityscape” (377). Museums thus played a central role in what Butsch, after Douglas, calls the “feminization of middle-class culture” (385). For more on the creation of a visually-oriented, specifically feminine consumer culture in the mid-nineteenth century, see Friedberg. As Buckley has put it, Barnum's museum was “a proto-department store of entertainment” (494). For more on the relationship between museums and department stores, see Bronner and Harris.

4. Most studies of American manhood, such as Rotundo's American Manhood, see such tensions only emerging at the turn of the century with the rise of commodity culture. While the end of the nineteenth century marked an intensification of such anxieties with an increasingly visible commodity culture, such studies tend to posit a monolithic middle-class of Weberian male producers up until that point rather than seeing the complex interweaving rhetorics and economics of consumption/leisure and production that were present from the beginnings of industrial capitalism. As Bederman has pointed out, “masculinity” only came to be frequently used as a noun—referring specifically to “manly,” virile passions—at the turn of the century. While masculinity as a term may not have been in play at mid-century, this essay traces the pre-history of the term by exploring those “virile” masculine passions that white middle-class men already strove to recover through contact with “primitive” others.

5. Here, I shift the emphasis of museum critics such as Clifford who focus on how objects (and people) in the museum are “detached from their original temporal occasions, and given enduring value in a new arrangement” (231). Clifford has importantly pointed to the ways in which cultures, specifically those of “native” peoples, are constantly in flux and interchange with other cultures, but he tends to return to an essentialist position when detailing the ways in which western collecting has taken non-western objects from “their original” contexts, rather than focusing on how those objects and their “value in a new arrangement” produce that “original” context so that it can be strategically re-appropriated. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett begins to shift the emphasis: “Objects become ethnographic by virtue of being defined, segmented, detached, and carried away by ethnographers” (387); “the putative cultural wholes of which [ethnographic fragments] are part” are also “the creation of the ethnographer” (389). For a critique of Clifford along these lines, see Shelton.

6. In this way, the mid-century museum was imagined to deliver, as Haraway has argued in reference to turn-of-the-century natural history museums, a “prophylactic dose of nature” (26) for embattled Anglo-Saxon masculinity. I am deeply indebted to Haraway's ideas about the museum's work of resurrecting an over-civilized Euro-American manhood through contact with animals and “primitive” cultures.

7. See Betts, for more on Barnum's tenuous relationship with the scientific community.

8. McConachie succinctly describes this pamphlet as “present[ing] the museum as a series of object lessons in a domestic culture which has colonized religion, society, and nature” (169). As an 1854 Putnam's article put it, the museum's lecture room “has now become a kind of compromise between the theatre and the Church, it is a neutral ground upon which all parties and conditions may, and do meet” (“Places of Public Amusement” 148-49).

9. See Buckley's arguments about how “Barnum created a public” (472), “unmapped in the contours of class interest” (495), by “appropriat[ing] the assets of conventional bourgeois morality and plac[ing] them on a cash basis” (538). Also see Bennett's discussion of the ways in which museums and exhibitions in Victorian England “transformed the many-headed mob into an ordered crowd, a part of the spectacle and a sight of pleasure in itself” (85), by “provid[ing] a context in which the working- and middle-class publics could be brought together and the former … could be exposed to the improving influence of the latter” (86).

10. Journal, vol. 1 (1837-1846), ed. Bradford Torrey; Vol. 7 of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau 464, undated in Torrey edition; dated Sept. 24, 1843, in slightly different form, in the new Princeton edition, Journal, vol. 1 (1837-1844), gen. ed. John C. Broderick 465. Since the Princeton edition has yet to publish all volumes of the journal, all references will be to the 1906 Torrey edition and will be cited parenthetically with journal (not collected work) volume number.

11. For Thoreau's visits to Barnum's museum, see Journal 7: 76 (Nov. 22, 1854); 9: 133 (Oct. 25, 1856); 10: 443 (May 24, 1858).

12. Brown reads Emerson's visit to the Muséum d'histoire naturelle as central to his elaboration of a similarly emblematic, transcendental understanding of nature.

13. For more on the connections between museums and theaters, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 397-407, Butsch, and McConachie.

14. Here, Thoreau seems to anticipate Walter Benjamin's critique of the anaethestic effects of early commodity culture of the nineteenth century. For an insightful reconstruction of Benjamin's critique, see Buck-Morss.

15. Thoreau's relationship with the market economy has received much attention as of late, beginning with Michael Gilmore's “Walden and the Curse of Trade.” Gilmore notes Thoreau's critique of market forces and the relationships they entail while elucidating the ways in which Thoreau realized his own necessary involvement in the market both during his experiment at Walden Pond and in the publication of Walden. See also, Fink and Neufeldt. In a different vein, more similar to my own point, Warner has focused not on whether Thoreau's critique of capitalism can stand up to some theoretical standard, but rather on how his critique of capitalism is part of a driving dynamic of capitalism.

16. As Pearce phrases it, for Thoreau, “Savages, in their humanity and their thought, in their harmony and their wholeness, might guide men into the happiness proper to civilization” (150); “he wanted civilized men to have that integrity he found in savages” (149).

17. The standard description of the Indian notebooks can be found in Keiser. See also Fleck, ed., The Indians of Thoreau, Sayre, and Johnson. The unpublished notebooks are located in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Sayre makes a case for numbering twelve volumes, while most number eleven; Johnson argues for dating the start of the notebooks in 1849, while most agree upon 1847.

18. That Thoreau actually planned to write such a book is highly debatable. See Sayre 101-22. For other, on the whole, celebratory accounts of Thoreau's depiction of Indians, see Fussell and Gura.

19. The idea of savagism is from Pearce. This is Sayre's major thesis, one reiterated by Murray and Frost.

20. Thoreau wrote this passage (January 23, 1858) after his last Maine expedition (1857) in which he met Joe Polis. Its racial logic and its date weaken the argument that Thoreau's racial thinking somehow drastically changed as a result of his encounter with Polis. This is not to deny that Polis affected Thoreau deeply, but simply to question the idea that he was able to transcend savagist thinking through actual contact with “real” Indians.

21. Horsman has argued that this type of essentializing, biological logic of race had come to supersede an earlier environmental understanding of race as dominant in the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century. As I believe the case of Okah Tubbee exemplifies (see below), an idea of race as cultural difference was assimilated to new ideas of essential biological difference, such that race was defined as both cultural (performative) and essential (biological), a definition at once doubly binding and full of slippages. See Michaels for a similar exploration of the ways in which “cultural identity” always depends upon an implicitly biological idea of race.

22. During the 1840s, Barnum owned two museums in New York and one each in Baltimore and Philadelphia, besides carrying on a steady exchange of attractions with Boston Museum proprietor Moses Kimball. As he notes in his autobiography, “For many years I had been in the habit of engaging parties of American Indians from the far West to exhibit at the Museum, and had sent two or more Indian companies to Europe, where they were regarded as very great ‘curiosities’” (Struggles 573).

23. See Littlefield xxxvii, for this argument. Also see Littlefield xxxviii-xxxix, for an account of the various editions of the biography. I have relied upon Littlefield's introduction to sketch out the portions of Tubbee's life not covered in his biography. According to Littlefield, the introductory essay “was apparently composed by Allen” (xxiii); as for the narrative of Tubbee's life itself, Littlefield says that “Okah Tubbee dictated the narrative, Laah Ceil wrote it down at Allen's suggestion, and Allen edited it for publication” (xxiv). All later editions, which appeared under Laah Ceil's name, are essentially the same, only longer. Allen probably published the original edition under his name because of his publishing connections in New York, but only wrote the introductory section. Littlefield reproduces the fourth and last contemporary edition of the biography—A Sketch of the Life of Okah Tubbee, (Called) William Chubbee … By Laah Ceil Manatoi Elaah Tubbee, His Wife. Unless indicated otherwise, all citations will be to the Littlefield edition and will be given parenthetically. Citations to the slightly different original edition, A Thrilling Sketch of the Life of the Distinguished Chief Okah Tubbee … By Rev. L. L. Allen, will be noted as Allen.

24. Tubbee probably passed as an Indian beginning in the early 1830s, but he did not promote himself as Okah Tubbee until the mid-1840s. This chronology leads to the probability that he adapted his name from the title character—“one of the most noble specimens of physical manhood” (208)—of Simms's short story written in 1841. It is also possible Simms based his character on Okah Tubbee; as always, racial lines of cultural appropriation fail to reveal neat categories of origin and influence. In any case, Tubbee and his wife exploited racial logics similar to those expounded in Simms's tale about a failed experiment in civilizing Indians on a Mississippi plantation, even if they did not consciously appropriate his name from the story.

25. For more on the logic of the vanishing American, see Pearce and Horsman.

26. Most other Native American speakers and autobiographers of the period similarly felt it necessary to distinguish themselves from African Americans. See, for example, Black Hawk 152-53; Apess 124-25; and Copway 169.

27. For Barnum's account of donning blackface himself in his early days with a traveling show, see Struggles 89-90. William Henry Lane (“Juba”), the most famous of black minstrel dancers in the pre-Civil War period, did appear at Barnum's museum, but in blackface like the white performers. For a reading of the need to blacken Lane's face, see Lott 112-18.

28. For Barnum's account of Heth, see Struggles 73-76.

29. Barnum characterized African Americans in general elsewhere: “The black man possesses a confiding disposition, thoroughly tinctured with religious enthusiasm, and not characterized by a spirit of revenge” (Struggles 623).

30. Sayre makes a similar point to mine, but because of his focus—specifically on Thoreau and Indians—does not develop it further: “[The slaves'] pathos was a call on his manhood, but they were not his manly equals. Towards the Indians he was exactly the opposite. … Their natural grandeur evoked his envy and admiration. They were examples of manhood rather than calls upon it” (25).

31. As Myers points out, “it is remarkable that he has very little to say about blacks themselves” (387).

32. In “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Thoreau “remind[s his] countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour” (102).

33. These earlier writings logically set up the terms for Thoreau's celebration of John Brown's failed raid into Virginia. In all three of his published eulogies, Thoreau spends little time on the men that Brown was attempting to help gain freedom, nor on their own sacrifices. Instead, Thoreau focuses on how Brown, through “manly directness and force,” has “lifted [Americans] out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood” (“A Plea” 127, 125).

34. Elsewhere, Thoreau argues that the Indians, in their manly and stoic acceptance of their fate, “teach us how to die” (“Autumnal Tints” 270). Furthermore, Thoreau argues that John Brown was “befriended only by Indians” (“A Plea” 116), and hence, he links Brown—and his “manly directness”—more closely with Indians than the slaves he attempted to free.

35. Aitteon becomes a doubly-troublesome figure for Thoreau, because Thoreau has employed him and is thereby culpable for his transformation from independent Indian to commodified laborer.

36. This distinction emerges in Thoreau's account of his final trip to Maine in his journal (but not in The Maine Woods). Before hiring Joe Polis as their guide, he and his companion decide against “a young, very dark-complexioned Indian” because “he was too dark-colored, as if with African blood” (Journal 9: 486 [July 22, 1857]). Thoreau wants a “full-blooded” Indian as close to his primitive ancestry as possible for his guide, not a degraded “half-breed” possibly of African blood.

37. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues, such exhibits “blurr[ed] the line” between “theater and living ethnographic display” (397) in their “production of wildness” (403).

38. For Thoreau's account of seeing arrowheads at Barnum's museum, see Journal 6: 76 (Nov. 22, 1854). For his disgust at craniometry, see 4: 146 (June 25, 1852).

39. Copway, a Chippewa, gained a great deal of fame in the late 1840s and early 1850s by lecturing in some of the same venues as Tubbee and similarly publishing an autobiography. For more on Copway, see Smith.

40. The section of The Maine Woods in which Thoreau describes this lecture was not published during his lifetime. Before his death, however, Thoreau had transformed his journal entry into the posthumously-published manuscript in which the lecture serves as a commentary on hearing Indians speak at a campsite in Maine.

41. In Walden, Thoreau turns to the act of watching commercial theatrical performances to describe, how “we are not wholly involved with nature,” a detachment/contact with both nature and his own body that mirrors his experience at Ktaadn (135).

42. For more on the beginnings of the reservation system and the logic underlying it, see Trennert.

I have presented earlier versions of sections of this essay at the Literature and Popular Culture conference at suny-Binghamton, the Southern Writers, Southern Writing conference at the University of Mississippi, and the American Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago. I would like to thank respondents to these earlier versions and Bill Brown, Laura Rigal, and Kenneth Warren, in particular, for their helpful suggestions and comments.

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